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How To Setup Commercial Lighting For Food Photography

By Marc Schultz | 28-July-2013

Lately I have been getting more into food photography for commercial reasons. So I am going to show you the main commercial studio lighting setup I use for food.

But first I am going to explain why I shoot food with studio strobes as opposed to many food shooters who photograph food with only natural light. First off, a lot of food bloggers like to shoot with natural light because for one, there is no need to spend thousands of dollars on a studio lighting setup. It is also WYSIG (what you see is what you get). Plus it is a lot easier for shooters who don’t have that much experience working with studio strobes to get the light into the right position when you can use daylight and see how it is lighting up your food before you press the shutter. This is of course something a bit trickier to do with intermittent studio strobe lighting. The main thing about shooting with daylight that food bloggers like though is that it really has that look of light coming through the window that many of them are aiming for. And for a non-commercial look to food photography, a lot of people want that natural look of daylight hitting the food as if the dish were sitting on the kitchen table next to a window.

But shooting with daylight is not as good as shooting with strobes because with strobes you are able to control the direction and power of the light at all times, something you can’t do with daylight. With studio strobes you can also shoot day or night, on rainy days, and all the other times of the day when there is no natural daylight available. So, if you have studio lighting there is no good reason to shoot food with natural light, especially since you can create the same effects as natural light with strobes as wellwhich I teach about here in my other post if you are interested.

When shooting food for commercial purposes I also don’t want the light to look like natural daylight because commercial lighting for food is more about nice crisp highlights on the top of the food to help bring out the texture. Plus being able to have highlights on the food from lights placed on both sides of the food is nice too. It is of course unnatural to have light coming from two directions like this, but commercial lighting is not about a natural look. And double sided highlights isn’t something you can create when shooting with a single natural light source like daylight coming through your window. Lastly, when shooting with natural light you may encounter slow shutter speeds. This may require you to shoot on a tripod at all times. With strobes the duration of the light from the flash is very short. So you can shoot at faster speeds of 1/125th, 1/160th, or 1/200th and handhold the camera at all times if you want. This offers a lot more versatility on changing camera angles quickly.

So let me get back to what I am here to show you about. Last week I did a food shoot with a commercial food lighting setup. I shot some bagel sandwiches on a white background.

As you can see in the photo above from the shoot I did, there is lighting that appears to be hitting the food from all directions and there are no heavy, dark areas. The lighting is crisp, vibrant, has plenty of contrast, good highlights on both the top and sides of the food, and there is nice color pop. The setup was 4 lights.

Here is how I did it. I placed 1 light each positioned at 10:30 and 2:30 to the food as 2 separate backlights. Each of the backlights where fitted with honeycombs (grids) over the lights and barn doors (directional panels on the sides of the lights) to control the width of the beam of the backlights. The grid sent a nice hard focused beam of backlight onto the food and the barn doors helped to narrow the beam of light coming out of the strobe by flagging the light so that it didn’t hit anything except the top and sides of the bagel on both sides as I wanted it.

But now you need some more overall light because with only 2 backlights you are going to end up with a lot of heavy shadows in front of the food and basically a rather dark picture except for the 2 back highlights you have setup on the food. So then I added in a 3rd strobe positioned at 7:00 and aimed at the ceiling to bounce it indirectly back onto the food. That light at 7:00 bounced off the ceiling and filled in some light on the front of the food and a bit more light all around. Alternatively, some people will hang the 3rd light with a soft box above the food, but that is more work to setup and requires a boom. It is also just as easy to bounce the light off the ceiling if you have a white ceiling that is not more than 3 meters high. So all you have to do is raise the strobe on the light stand high up and close to the ceiling so that the light doesn’t spill directly onto the food below and thus it creates a nice soft diffused bounce off the ceiling landing back onto the food.

Three lights is usually enough light for a commercial food setup like this, but I was shooting on a white background and the background itself was still looking a bit too dark for my taste. So I setup a fourth light at 3:00 to bounce off the ceiling from the side of the white background and fill in some light behind the food on the white paper background itself. Below is a snap of my lighting setup:

Unfortunately you can’t see the other 2 lights at 7:00 and 3:00 in the lighting setup shot above (which were positioned high up to bounce off the ceiling), but you can see the 2 backlights, which were positioned about 12 inches above the food. This is a good height above the food for backlight purposes.

Hi Rob – Sorry, I’m not familiar with that particular model of hot lights, but I have shot food with hot lights before. Yes, continuous lighting will work, but personally I didn’t like the type of contrast you get from longer exposures and Tungsten lights. But if that’s what you have then definitely use them. But if it’s a decision between buying strobes or continuous lights for food then I would say buy strobes. You can also do some types of food photography using Speedlight flashes as well. I hope that helps and if you have more questions please feel free to post them.

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6-March-2015 4:37 AM

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Rob Stathem

Hi Marc,

For future blog posts, it might be cool if you included some of the “tricks of the trade” when shooting food…such as how to stylize the food to make it look fantastic. This would, of course, fall under food styling rather than food photography, but, I’m sure you’ve learned a lot of techniques from food stylists over the years.

I’ve run into some issues when shooting food, especially when preparing to photograph salmon or halibut. When cooking the salmon or halibut, the height of the fish shrinks, and I’m left with a very short piece of fish. So, it doesn’t look as good on camera, and even if I “boost” up the fish with rice or vegetables below the fish, it still doesn’t look as appetizing.

That’s been an issue for me in the past…also, preparing grilled cheese sandwiches to photograph. I wonder how food stylists are able to get little “dollops” of melted cheese to come out of the bread. In the past, I’ve had melted cheese ooze out and then it hides the bottom layer of bread.

It’s amazing how much work goes into a successful food shoot. If composition and lighting are spot on, but, the food doesn’t look as good, than the project won’t be a success.

At any rate, just thought I’d throw out this possible blog idea — if in fact you’re interested in discussing this?

Thanks for your thoughts Rob. I probably don’t know enough about food styling techniques to fill a meaningful blog post as I don’t always pay that much attention to the tricks the food stylists are using. I usually only get involved when something isn’t looking the way I want it to. And that’s when I might try and offer some ideas of things to try. I am also afraid you are facing different challenges with each different type of food as you already experienced so there isn’t a rule of thumb. I personally don’t have any real experience with salmon or halibut or grilled cheese sandwiches I am afraid, but one approach I can suggest with food in general is to try and think of ways to make it look prepared without it really being prepared. For example, you can often boil things just a little bit to get them cooked a bit without overcooking them to where they shrink and go flat as they might when you pan fry them. Pan frying causes a lot of evaporation and you tend to lose a lot of moisture and size that way. And then to give them that finished look you could try using a very small blow torch to just sear the surface of something to give it the finished pan fried or grilled look you want. Or maybe boil it and then drop it in a hot pan for just a few seconds to sear the outside that way. Toothpicks inserted inside food can also be useful to help keep it straight or stand it up if it is looking too flat. You have to experiment. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Thick sauces are also a problem because they coagulate very quickly. So sometimes you also just have to be fast when the food is set down and shoot it before it goes flat. So you don’t always have that much time with certain types of food. You can also use a small paint brush with a bit of olive oil sometimes to give the food a bit of a sheen if it looks too dry once it has gone a bit cold from sitting on the plate for a while, plus the oil will also give you better highlights and nice reflections on the food, making it look fresher in the photos. But use it sparingly. You don’t want the food to end up looking too greasy either. I know some food stylists also use hair spray to keep things looking firm too. I have never tried that though. Those are the few general things that come to mind. But just think it through a bit more with each different food item. Think about the look you are trying to achieve on the food and how you might get it. Don’t think about really cooking the food because fully cooked food isn’t always so nice looking. Think about ways to get the look you want without really cooking it in a traditional sense. Maybe with the melted cheese challenge you can melt some cheese separately and then try adding the melted bits on later to where you want them. You can also prepare things separately and then add more of one thing later by preparing extra of something like I suggested with melting some extra cheese and adding it on. Also a lot of food shots you see are also retouched where things are shot separately and then put together on the computer. So they are often a composite of parts of the food shot separately and put together into one photo in post, especially if you are talking about the kind of food you see on menus from big multinational fast food chains. I hope that helps.

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23-September-2014 12:30 AM

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Rob Stathem

Hi Marc,

My apologies for the delay! Thanks so much for offering your tips and suggestions. I will definitely experiment a bit more and I’m going to re-shoot the fish and grilled cheese sandwiches and hopefully I’ll get better results the 2nd time around. It’s such a bummer when the food doesn’t come out right, even though the lighting and composition are spot on. It’s so easy to get frustrated with the hours that feel “wasted.”

I have a tremendous amount of appreciation and respect for commercial photographers because there is no room for error on real live photo shoot. They have to nail it every time, or, the client isn’t happy.

Thanks for going into the analysis of a commercial shoot. I’m new to using strobe lights. I have two and I diffuse with an umbrella and softbox.

My question for you is…I enjoy the look of photos with contrast of light, and I wonder if a barn door, honeycomb grid, or even a snoot (to attach on one of these strobes) would be worthwhile to emulate a moody shot?

I feel that the umbrellas and softboxes are giving me purely EVEN light and I’m trying to mix it up and create different moods.

I will try to answer your questions, but it depends a lot on what it is you are shooting and unfortunately you didn’t indicate that.

For now I am going to assume you are shooting people in which case shooting with a softbox (and possibly even an umbrella in some cases) is the correct way to get that moody lighting because you still need some diffusion over the lights to soften the light. Plus all those light shaping attachments like snoots, grids, and barn doors you mentioned will leave the light bare and undiffused which will make the light too harsh for skin tones.

But to create the moody shots you are talking about it comes down to the direction and placement of the light more than anything and not really the light attachment you use except for the fact that you need an attachment that will soften the light when shooting people as I said.

Please read my other post on the blog here about how to shoot with low key lighting. It is a two part post showing you how to setup moody lighting for people. You will see 4-5 examples of moody shots I took within in the post and all of those shots were taken using a strip soft box.

After you have read it please feel free to let me know if you have more questions. I hope that helps.

Best wishes,

Marc

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19-March-2014 3:05 PM

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Rob Stathem

Hi Marc,

My apologies for responding so late to your reponse! Thank you again for your suggestions and I will definitely check that earlier blog post out.